


hush hush hush, here comes the boogeyman

by Milieu



Series: 33 Day Guro Challenge [11]
Category: Alice is Dead (Video Game)
Genre: 33 Day Guro Challenge, Alice is Dead Spoilers, Body Horror, Drabble, Gen, Mentions of Animal Cruelty, Pre-Canon, Reality Bending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:54:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4109827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milieu/pseuds/Milieu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wanting to make things right doesn't mean you can change anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hush hush hush, here comes the boogeyman

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt 11 - Conjoined Bodies
> 
> Contains spoilers for some of the backstory and parts of Episode 3 of Alice is Dead.
> 
> Title is from "Here Comes the Boogeyman" by Henry Hall.

Go to work for the Queen, they said. He'll pay good money, they said.

It was true that the Queen paid far more than any salary Burr had ever made teaching, but the price he himself paid in return for being allowed to carry out his experiments was far too steep for any of it to be worth it.

Every day, he saw it. Lingering in the corner of his vision, sliding between the cracks of reality, the spaces where nothing should exist.  Every day, the only thing that kept him from ending it all was the possibility that he might somehow find a way to put things right again.

He got up before the crack of dawn every morning and drank far too much coffee and slaved the day away, and went back to bed just hours before the crack of dawn and did it all over again the next day. He tried to keep everything to himself to buy more time - even went so far as collecting any stray cats he saw and mutilating them himself so that he had something for Alice to take care of in order to keep up pretenses that the Oystercloud wasn't fully functional yet.

He knew his time was running out, just as part of him knew that he would fail to make any meaningful headway in what little he had left. But every day, he tried again.

But the Queen had eyes and ears everywhere, and of course he found out about Oystercloud sooner rather than later. One of the goons sent to "take care" of Burr tried to feed him some nonsense about how they were only doing this because he'd tried to deceive the Queen, but he knew. This had been his fate all along, whenever Oystercloud was finally complete.

Go to work for the Queen, they said. Nobody's ever walked away from one of his jobs, they said.

Raymond Burr wanted to face death with dignity, but he of all people knew best that he's always been a coward at heart. He trembled and closed his eyes, knowing that his last thoughts will always be of that  _thing_.

That thing that wavers in and out of visibility, that thing with a twisted, almost human body and the face of an animal and the eyes of something that should have never existed, that damned  _thing_ that he turned the only precious thing the world to him into because he was so sure that this time,  _this time_ , he'd gotten it right and he'd never even noticed she was there until she was right in front of him and reaching in-

_daddy?_

It was the first time he'd ever heard it - her - speak. He wasn't even sure it was really hearing, but she had said something and it had reached him. His greatest hope and greatest fear confirmed at once - she was still in there somewhere.

In his last moments, Raymond Burr wept.


End file.
